The best way to dilute and downgrade the quality of a brand like IIT

The best way to dilute and downgrade the quality of any brand achieved over time is to just add other lower grade products to it..

The best way to dilute and downgrade the quality of any brand achieved over time is to just add other lower grade products to it..

As an analogy, take the Ambassador car manufactured in India, that has served millions since Independence and has been a work horse and an icon on its own merits.

Spend lavishly, give it a new look and put the BMW Badge on it?? Will it fool the market? What is in a name without Quality ?

It may not hurt the BMW brand but will definitely hurt Ambassador. Roorkee University that has thousands of alumni who have treasured the Roorkee University Brand status has suffered this fate and alumni are still struggling to come to grips with the IIT tag.

Yes there is nothing stopping the government from renaming a dozen more engineering colleges as IITs. The result will be that we would have created a two tier IIT system.. We do not have to look too far to find answers. Each Year we have 4,00,000 students in India who take the JEE exam. Guess which IITs they select in their application ? Top five of course.. Market forces cannot be fooled or manipulated. Rather than building many more quality engineering colleges from the ground up, which the government cannot truly afford, just changing the names of a few colleges that have been around longer than IITs, just to please political factions, without the rigorous process of recruitment and training, was a bad move even a few years ago. Why continue the process ?

A new public petition to Preserve the IIT Brand and build Complementary Brands to serve India has been created by a team of IIT Alumni who are concerned that there could be seven more IITs announced in a couple of months, by HRD Minister, based on media reports.

In less than 48 hours there have been 1000 endorsements of the petition from Indians all over the world. It is time for the public to say "No More IITs" in the interests of the esteemed institutions and the nation . The petition url is

http://www.petitiononline.com/SaveIITs/petition.html

If you believe that India should have more quality engineering colleges, please sign the attached petition. Please endorse whole heartedly and express your views freely.

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